Bog Bodies: Preserved Prehistoric Humans and the Role of Collective Memory, Lecture notes of Network Theory

Download Bog Bodies: Preserved Prehistoric Humans and the Role of Collective Memory and more Lecture notes Network Theory in PDF only on Docsity! TRAMES, 2008, 12(62/57), 3, 299–308 BODIES FROM THE BOG: METAMORPHOSIS, NON-HUMAN AGENCY AND THE MAKING OF ‘COLLECTIVE’ MEMORY1 Stuart McLean University of Minnesota Abstract. This essay is about bog bodies – the preserved remains of prehistoric humans, often interpreted as ritual killings, found in peat bogs across northwest Europe. It considers the production of knowledge about the human past as a complex, relational process implicating multiple actors and traversing the terms of any straightforward nature-culture binary. It argues that theorizations of collective memory – and in particular of its ‘collective’ aspect - need to pay closer attention, both to the role of non-human agencies in the shaping of humanly intelligible artefacts and histories and to the relationship between preservation and transformation as a constitutive feature of collective memory. By way of illustration, it traces in some detail the story of one particular bog body, from death and deposition in the ground through rediscovery, excavation, archaeological analysis and subsequent public display. DOI: 10.3176/tr.2008.3.05 Keywords: memory, metamorphosis, nature/culture, non-human agency 1. Who will say ‘corpse’? Who will say ‘corpse’ to his vivid cast? Who will say ‘body’ to his opaque repose? The words are those of the Northern Ireland-born poet Seamus Heaney, from one of a series of poems published between 1969 and 1975, apostrophising both 1 Bog bodies range in date from the Mesolithic period to the twentieth century, the majority of the better known finds dating from the Iron Age (c.500 BC onward in northern Europe). Peat bogs once covered substantial areas of northern Europe, but today have all but disappeared in many areas, due partly to their drainage and reclamation for agricultural use and partly to the cutting of peat to burn as fuel. Many, perhaps the majority, of archaeological finds in peat bogs have occurred accidentally in the course of peat cutting. For the purposes of my argument, I make no distinction here between ‘history’ and ‘memory’. Stuart McLean 300 the bog landscapes of Ireland and northwest Europe and the uncannily preserved human corpses retrieved from their depths (Heaney 1975:36).2 The poem in question, The Grauballe Man, takes its title from one such find, an Iron Age man uncovered in 1952 in the course of peat-cutting at Nebelgård Fen, a peat bog close to the village of Grauballe in Jutland, Denmark. The body is currently on display in the Moesgård Museum of Prehistory near Århus. (see Plate 1, Photo 1). Heaney’s poem recounts a scene of simultaneous recognition and non- recognition. The dead man confronts the modern spectator both as a contemporary presence and as a figure indelibly marked by signs of otherness: his darkened, leather-like appearance, his distorted features, the head partially flattened by the weight of peat over the intervening centuries. Heaney lingers over the details of these metamorphoses, allowing the still discernibly human form to be further transfigured through metaphor into new and fantastic shapes, suggesting the body’s gradual re-absorption by the natural world to which it had been consigned: As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan’s foot or a wet swamp root. His lips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud. (Heaney 1975:35) 2. The Bog People The Grauballe Man and its companion poems were inspired by Heaney’s reading of The Bog People, a popular work by the eminent Danish archaeologist Peter Vilhelm Glob, who was involved in the excavation and subsequent investi- gation of a number of peat bog corpses, including the Grauballe Man. Glob’s study, first published in Danish in 1965 (and in English translation in 1968) became one of the principal channels through which information about bog bodies 2 The poem Bogland appears in the collection Door Into The Dark (1969); The Tollund Man and Nerthus in Wintering Out (1972); Belderg, Bog Queen, The Grauballe Man, Punishment, Come to the Bower, Strange Fruit and Kinship in North (1975). Bodies from the bog 303 was performed and the stomach and intestines were removed for further analysis, revealing that the Grauballe Man’s last meal, eaten shortly before his death, had consisted of a porridge or gruel made from corn, along with the seeds of more than 60 herbs and grasses and traces of the poisonous fungus ergot. The liver was removed for carbon-14 dating, which suggested that the Grauballe Man had died in around 310 AD, possibly in winter, as indicated by lack of berries and fresh herbs in the last meal. A later C-14 dating, taken in 1996 using a sample of hair, would revise this result, pushing the time of death back still further to around 290 BC. X-rays of the body revealed fractures on the skull and right tibia. The finger- prints were recorded and the 21 remaining teeth removed and a set of dental X-rays taken. The results of these initial examinations were incorporated into a display at Moesgård Museum, along with contemporary newspaper clippings relat- ing to the discovery and photographs documenting the examination process itself (Ansigh 2001:50–51, Glob 1996:45–56). Glob (1969) describes the methods used to preserve the Grauballe Man, the first of the bog people to be preserved in his entirety using modern techniques. This involved replicating in the laboratory the effects of long-time immersion in the bog. A cross-section through the skin taken during the autopsy had revealed a light-coloured core with dark-coloured inner and outer surfaces, indicating that preservation in the bog had been the result of a tanning process. Glob and his colleagues decided to continue this process in the laboratory using a solution of oak bark, renewed at intervals over a period of one and a half years. When the body was finally removed from the solution and the bark-slime washed off, a further cross-section through the skin showed a uniform brown, confirming that the tanning process was now complete. Finally, cellodal, a coagulating synthetic resin, was injected under the skin to replace shrunken muscles (and two missing toes) in order to preserve the body’s shape and volume. The body was then exhibited in a glass case in Moesgård Museum, where visitors could encounter, in Glob’s words “one of the Iron Age people almost as he was nearly two thousand years ago, when he was deposited in the bog after ritual sacrifice” (Glob 1969: 58–59). In 2000, as part of a renewal of the Grauballe Man exhibit, the body was re- examined over a three-day period at the University Hospitals in nearby Århus. This included the taking of further X-rays and a total of 1362 CT cross-sections.6 The CT scans revealed for the first time that four lumbar vertebrae were missing and that the fracture to the skull revealed by the 1952 X-rays had occurred after death and had been caused not by a blow, as was originally thought, but by pressure in the bog (or possibly at the time of removal from the bog, when a 6 CT scanning, or computed tomography (from the Greek tomos, meaning slice) is a more sophisticated form of radiography. Scans are taken at intervals of 1–2 mm and are produced on monitor rather than film[0]. The varying densities of different tissues generate contrasts that result in sharp images of the anatomical structures within individual sections. When combined, the sections yield an accurate image of body’s internal structure; and thus afford a means of examining a body without further damaging it. Stuart McLean 304 bystander at Nebelgård Fen had accidentally stood on the Grauballe Man’s head). The re-examination also included further analysis of the stomach contents (removed in 1952 and preserved in a glass of ethanol); re-examination of the teeth (also removed in 1952); MR-scanning of the intestines; endoscopic investigations (using the opening from the 1952 autopsy) and skin analyses. Comparison of the more recent X-rays and CT scans with the published versions of the 1952 radio- graphs (the originals had since been lost) revealed some of the ways in which the body had changed over the intervening decades, including shrinkage of the brain and spinal cord, along with transformations wrought by the original conserva-tion process, such as the cellodal injected under the skin to preserve the body’s shape, which showed on the radiographs as an impenetrable mass. Although the Grauballe Man is now too fragile to be turned over, CT scanning enabled the pro- duction of 3-D computer generated reconstructions of the various body parts, making it possible to visualize and investigate not only the skeleton, but also skin, muscles and tendons. CT scans of the head were also used to produce a model of the skull, correcting for distortions due to the pressure or the overlying peat, which served as the basis for a clay reconstruction of the Grauballe Man’s head and face (Ansigh 2001:52–55, Van Der Sanden 1996:60). The results of the re-examination have been incorporated into a redesigned exhibit at Moesgård Museum. This includes a microscope through which visitors can examine a sliver of bone extracted from the Grauballe Man’s leg, along with the pollen grains comprising his last meal, and a video installation documenting the process of facial reconstruction. The exhibit also features an interactive touch- screen display, enabling the visitor to select and view computer generated reconstructions of individual body parts, including the skull and brain, hair, teeth, arms and feet and genitalia (see Plate 2, Photo 2). 4. Collective memory: which collective? The topic of collective memory is the subject of an extensive literature and has been defined in a variety of ways. In much of this literature, however, it has been assumed that the collective referred to consists principally or solely of human beings.7 One recent challenge to this view has come from approach sometimes referred to as actor-network theory and associated with, for example, the French sociologists of science Bruno Latour and Michel Callon and the English sociologist of science John Law. Actor-network theory proposes that the collective 7 See, for example, the classic exposition of the concept of collective memory, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs who follows his former teacher, Durkheim, in defining memory with reference to what he takes to be the distinctive attributes of the human collective. Thus, remembrance of the dead is assumed to be contingent upon the persistence of the human group of which they once formed a part or (where the immediate contemporaries of the dead person are similarly deceased) on the continued practice of an ancestral cult by the living members of that group (Halbwachs 1992:73). Bodies from the bog 305 of humans envisioned by Durkheimian sociology be replaced by what Callon and Law term a ’hybrid’ collective, composed of shifting networks of associations between humans and non-humans and cross-cutting what is taken to be an artificial (modern, Western) distinction between the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ realms (Callon and Law 1995). Non-humans might include animals, plants and micro- organisms, along with a range of humanly devised objects and technologies, in so far as these are capable, under the right circumstances, of assuming an agentive role – that is, as Latour puts it, of “making some difference to a state of affairs” (Latour 2005:52).8 Actor-network theory offers a valuable reminder that the preservation of the past is not an exclusively human project. The story of the Grauballe Man exhibit reveals a crucial interdependence between the contemporary experience of the Iron Age past and an assortment of latter-day investigative and imaging technologies, including photography, radiography, microscopy and, more recently, CT scanning and computer modelling, which actively transform the ways in which the Grauballe Man is seen and experienced, creating new perceptual objects and new sets of relationships between bodies and machines. The presence of the Grauballe Man is thus multiplied and dispersed across different media. He exists not simply as a body in a glass case, but also in the form of photographs, films, texts, micro- scope slides and interactive digital displays. It is important to remember, however, that the humanly devised technologies of the research laboratory and the museum display space are not the only agents of memory at work here. The body’s preservation and transmission to posterity are the product too of chemical processes unfolding unseen below bog’s surface, as a result of which the body is not only preserved but also transformed, both its appearance and its chemical composition being decisively altered. The Grauballe Man emerges into historical legibility through a movement that confounds any rigid distinction between the natural and social realms by traversing and linking conventionally distinct domains: the Iron Age practice of sacrificial violence, the depths of the bog, the archaeology laboratory and the museum space. Interpreta- tions of the past generated from the excavation and analysis of bog bodies and other finds are, in turn, projected back onto the landscapes from which the finds in question were first retrieved, these same landscapes being re-imagined in the present as onetime sacred spaces and sites of ritual sacrifice.9 8 Latour suggests that if such a distinction has tended, since the 17th century, to be maintained in the organization of academic knowledge (for example, in the institutionalised separation between the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences), it has often been flouted at level of practice, as modern scientific and technological advances have spawned a proliferation of nature- society ‘imbroglios’ (knowledges, technologies, manufactured objects etc.) the presence of which has, finally, become impossible to ignore (Latour 1993:1–3, 13–15, 49–51). 9 This theme is made explicit in one of the wall displays at Moesgård Museum (Treacherous and Alluring Bogs), which describes the bog as a threshold between the human and supernatural worlds: “The bog is a strange and dangerous place, neither land nor water – a desolate landscape with neither roads, nor paths, nor fixed points, just a bottomless deep waiting to engulf the trespasser. 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(1969) The bog people: Iron Age man preserved. London: Faber and Faber. Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On collective memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heaney, Seamus (1975) North. London: Faber and Faber. Kehne, P. (2002) “Tacitus and the bog bodies”. In The mysterious bog people (exhibition catalogue), 94–96. C. Bergen, M. J. L. Th. Niekus, and . T. van Vilsteren, eds. Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Publishers. Latour, Bruno (1993) We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stead, I. M., J. B. Bourke and Don Brothwell, eds. (1986) Lindow man: the body in the bog. London: British Museum Publications. Tacitus (1970) The Agricola and the Germania. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Van der Sanden, Wijnand. (1996) Through nature to eternity: the bog bodies of northwest Europe. Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International. Plate 1 Photo 1. Grauballe Man displayed in Moesgård Museum of Prehistory. Photo by Stuart McLean. Stuart McLean. Bodies from the bog Plate 2 Photo 2. Touch-screen menu for interactive display based on CT scans of Grauballe Man, Moesgård Museum of Prehistory. Photo by Stuart McLean. Stuart McLean. Bodies from the bog